Love gone wrong

A generation of British screenwriters is turning messy relationships into great TV. Paul Kalina talks to one of them.

David Nicholls's screenwriting career lives in the shadows of the comedy-drama Cold Feet (he wrote one season), but his inspiration harks back much further, to the sophisticated American screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s.

The Philadelphia Story is his all-time favourite. "Usually in a romantic comedy there's a couple that ought to be together but they go out with other people who have terrible laughs and are completely unsuitable, and the couple that should get together [do] get together. But The Philadelphia Story starts with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn's divorce. They hate each other, and right until the very, very last minute you're not sure which way it will go."

Which is a good pointer to why Rescue Me, a romantic comedy about the fumbled reconciliation between magazine writer Katie (Sally Phillips) and her doctor husband Matthew (Vincent Regan), kicks off with the anguish of lives that have run off the rails.

"I'd written about the beginning of love, falling in love, miscommunication and crushes," Nicholls says. "I wanted to write about the other end of it, about the melancholy and loneliness and disappointment when a relationship goes wrong."

Like The Philadelphia Story, the outcome had to remain ambiguous, he says. "The obvious thing to do is to say that they belong together and they're just being stupid. If only they'd sit down and talk. Right to the end, it's unclear which way it's going to go; maybe they're better off without each other, maybe there's someone else who's better."

Setting the drama against the backdrop of a women's lifestyle magazine provided an opportunity to talk about a range of contemporary issues and to highlight the disparity between real and idealised lives. "The irony of someone whose own life is so much messier and more troubled is a really nice pay-off," Nicholls says.

He praises the powers-that-be of British television for the wave of contemporary thirtysomething comedy-dramas (another of his creations, I Saw You, recently screened on the ABC). These shows have been driven by writers, not market forces, he says.

"Writers write about things that affect their own lives, and this is a generation of writers who are finding themselves single at 30, going through divorces, and realising their family lives aren't quite like their parents'. I assumed I'd be married at 24. I'm now 36 and I'm still not. That's an interesting subject for a generation of writers."

Nicholls is now at work on his second novel and a screen adaptation of his first, Starter for Ten, the rights of which were acquired by Tom Hanks's company. It's a story, he says, about class and education involving a gauche 19-year-old who makes it onto University Challenge and falls in love with a teammate. And the screenplay, he is at pains to point out, won't transpose the characters or settings to America.